This page used to be a short summary of one article from Attack Magazine. Most people who land on it are looking for Attack’s book, The Secrets of Techno Production, so that comes first. After that is a full beginner’s guide to making a techno track: drums, bass, chords, sidechain and arrangement.

Looking for the book? The Secrets of Techno Production is a 218-page paperback from Attack Magazine. It comes with over 1 GB of audio samples and project files, and covers techno from Detroit to modern mainstage. You can buy it from Attack’s own store, which ships worldwide. It’s the follow-up to their earlier book, The Secrets of Dance Music Production.

Now this guide draws on two production books. The first is Electronica Dance Music Programming Secrets by Roger Brown and Martin Griese, whose techno chapter is still one of the clearest explanations of how the genre is built. It’s out of print, but second-hand copies turn up. The second is Become a Competent Music Producer in 365 Days by Sam George, a step-by-step course in mixing and production that you can buy from the independent bookshop Backstory.

Techno Production at a Glance

Start With the Groove, Not the Song

If you come from songwriting, techno can feel strange at first. There’s no verse, no chorus and often no melody you could hum. That’s fine. Brown and Griese describe techno as the process of stripping music down to its simplest parts and seeing how far you can go while keeping the groove intact.

So the work is different. Instead of writing a tune, you build a loop that feels good, then spend the rest of the track changing it slowly. Texture and sound do the job that chord changes do in a pop song.

Pick your tempo and leave it alone. Most techno sits somewhere between about 125 and 135 BPM. Sam George makes the point in 365 Days that tempo changes in a techno track would make it impossible for a DJ to mix.

1. Program the Drums

Techno drums come from electro, the broken, syncopated beats of early-1980s hip-hop. Old-school techno sped those beats up and stripped them down. Modern techno went further still, to very sparse patterns.

You don’t need to learn the history to use it. Here’s a solid starting pattern for one bar of sixteenths:

Brown and Griese call this the classic techno beat. Those fast closed hats make any tempo feel quicker than it is, which is why the pattern turns up in trance and most other dance styles too.

From there, take things away:

• Mute the closed hats and let the open offbeat hats carry the push. You get space without losing the drive.
• Delete a few notes from a steady sixteenth hi-hat line and put open hats in the gaps. A robotic pattern picks up a little swing.
• Swap the open hats for a ride cymbal on a looser pattern for a spacier feel.
• Move the odd kick a sixteenth early or late, the electro way, so the beat stops being four square thumps.

Watch your velocities too. Sixteen hi-hats at the same velocity sound like a machine stuck on one setting. Vary them by hand in your drum editor, or use your DAW’s randomise function on a few notes.

One tip from the book: don’t stick to 808 and 909 kits. Try any drum sounds that come across as metallic or robotic. Techno is where odd sounds belong.

2. Write a Bassline That Moves

A techno bassline can be one note.

Brown and Griese’s first example is a simple two-note pattern, quantised to sixteenths. What makes it techno isn’t the notes. It’s the sound. Programming a techno bassline, they say, is largely about two controls: filter cutoff and filter resonance.

• Cutoff sets how much of the sound gets through the filter. Sweep it slowly up and down and a single repeating note keeps changing.
• Resonance boosts the frequencies around the cutoff point. If your filter sweeps only go from a dull thud to a plain bass, turn the resonance up.

Record those moves as automation so they play back the same every time. If your synth reacts to velocity, map velocity to the filter as well. A sawtooth pattern of velocities across a bar opens and closes the sound on every note.

Then try the tricks that give you the acid sound of the Roland TB-303:

• Very short notes. The filter opens and slams shut, and the resonance comes through.
• Octave jumps. Bounce one note between octaves on the offbeat sixteenths. A higher note often triggers a different tone.
• Slides. Set the synth to mono with portamento, then overlap two notes slightly. The pitch glides into the next note instead of starting again.
• Go low. Use the bottom of the synth’s range, the notes the manual tells you to avoid. Dark and strange suits techno.

If you’d like a tool to throw riffs at you, Riffer 4 by Audiomodern generates basslines, arpeggios and sequences in any key and scale, and you drag the MIDI into your DAW. It’s handy for breaking out of the same two notes. You can do everything in this section without it, though. See our Riffer 4 page for the details and current price.

3. Add Chords and Pads

Most techno is in a minor key. Start with a minor triad: the root, the note three semitones up and the note seven semitones up. In E minor that’s E, G and B. Our guide to minor chords in techno goes through why minor keys suit the genre and lists the common triads.

Keep the chords simple. Brown and Griese’s only chord example is one held chord that moves up a semitone after two bars, and they call that semitone shift the essence of techno. You don’t need a progression of eight chords.

To find a chord, loop your bassline and play over it on a synth pad until something fits. Pick sounds that are clearly synthetic rather than sounds imitating real instruments.

Once you have a chord, make it richer:

• Add octaves of notes already in the chord to make it fuller.
• Add a 7th or 9th. In E minor, adding D gives you Em7, and adding F♯ gives you Em9. Both suit long, atmospheric pads. Attack Magazine’s theory of techno pads article, an excerpt from their book, walks through this.
• Automate the filter. Opening the cutoff a little more at the end of each four-bar section adds energy without a new note.

Gate the Chord

One of techno’s oldest tricks is the volume gate. A held chord is switched on and off in sixteenths, so it sounds like it’s being played very fast. Originally a hardware gate did this, triggered by another part such as the hi-hats.

In a DAW you have three easy ways to do it:

• Draw volume automation that alternates between full and silent on every sixteenth.
• Use a tempo-synced LFO on the synth’s amp or volume, set to a square wave.
• Use a gate plugin with its sidechain input set to your hi-hat track, which is the original hardware method.

Add a filter sweep or some panning while the gate runs and a single chord can carry a whole section.

For pad sounds, our list of the top synth plugins for techno pads compares the main options, including Arturia Pigments. There’s also a full Pigments 7 review on the site. If you’d rather start from ready-made MIDI, the Unison techno MIDI chord collection gives you progressions to drop in and reshape.

4. Sidechain the Bass and Pads to the Kick

In techno the kick has to come through clearly. With a busy bassline and a held pad underneath, it won’t on its own.

Sidechain compression fixes this. Normally a compressor listens to the track it sits on. With a sidechain, it listens to a different track. Put a compressor on your bass, set its sidechain input to the kick, and the bass dips every time the kick hits. Sam George describes this as making space in the mix so things can poke through.

Do the same on the pad and you get the familiar pumping feel of dance music. Sam George suggests setting it far too strong at first, so you can clearly hear it working, then pulling it back.

If you don’t want the whole bass to dip, try a dynamic EQ instead. Set one band to the frequency where the kick and bass clash, and trigger that band from the kick. Only that slice of the bass gets cut, and only while the kick plays.

Your DAW’s stock compressor almost certainly has a sidechain input. If you’re new to compressors, start with our compression for beginners guide. smart:comp 3 by sonible is an option if you’d like a compressor that suggests settings for you.

5. Arrange by Adding and Taking Away

Brown and Griese sum up techno arrangement in one idea: the movement comes from changes in texture and instrumentation, not from chord changes or a verse and chorus.

In practice, lay out your loops across the timeline and work in blocks of 8 or 16 bars:

1. Intro. Drums only, or kick and hats. DJs need a simple beat to mix in over.
2. Build. Bring in the bassline, then the clap, then extra percussion, one layer at a time.
3. Main section. Add the pad or the gated chord. Keep the filter moving.
4. Breakdown. Pull the kick out. Let the pad or a sound effect hold the space. It can run 16 bars or more.
5. Drop. Bring the kick and bass back, often with one new element or a filter fully open.
6. Outro. Remove layers again until you’re back to drums, so the next DJ can mix out.

Within each block, keep changing something small: a hi-hat pattern, a filter, a kick that moves a sixteenth. If nothing has changed for 32 bars, the listener will notice.

Use reference tracks as you go. Sam George advises using current releases in your own sub-genre, because techno and house change every few months. Put a reference in your session, match your levels, and compare often.

6. Finish the Track

Set yourself a limit for a first track: one drum pattern, one bassline, one chord and a few variations of each. That’s enough for a full track.

When the arrangement is laid out, bounce it and listen on headphones, a phone and a car stereo. Fix the one thing that bothers you most, then start the next track.

FAQs: The Secrets of Techno Production

Is there a free PDF of The Secrets of Techno Production?

No, not legally. The book is sold by Attack Magazine as a paperback, and the copies passed around as PDFs are pirated and come without the 1 GB of samples and project files. You can buy it from Attack’s store.

Who wrote The Secrets of Techno Production?

It’s written by the team at Attack Magazine, the electronic music production magazine. It includes insights from techno artists such as Dave Clarke, Helena Hauff, DVS1, Ken Ishii and Len Faki.

What BPM is techno?

Most techno sits between about 125 and 135 BPM. Some styles go slower and harder styles go well above 140. Pick a tempo and keep it fixed for the whole track.

What key is techno usually in?

Usually a minor key. Minor chords give techno its dark, moody feel. See our guide to minor chords in techno.

Do I need hardware to make techno?

No. Every technique on this page works with the drum machine, synth and compressor that come with your DAW.

How do I make a techno bassline sound acid?

Use a mono synth with a resonant filter, short notes, octave jumps and portamento on overlapping notes. Turn the resonance up and automate the cutoff while the pattern loops.

Sources

• Roger James Brown and Martin Griese, Electronica Dance Music Programming Secrets, second edition (Prentice Hall), chapter 3: Programming Techno and Trance. Out of print.
• Sam George, Become a Competent Music Producer in 365 Days (Routledge, 2023), Unit 4 (sidechain compression), Unit 3 (dynamic EQ), Unit 7 (tempo) and Unit 10 (reference tracks). Available from Backstory.
• Attack Magazine, Attack Mag Releases The Secrets of Techno Production Book.